Friday, January 28, 2011

The official Indian position against including caste as a specificsub-set of racism is based on the assumption that race has a "physicalcomponent" which caste lacks. However a look at the history of theidea of race shows it to be a construct of a particular Europeananthropology and is, like caste, embodied in the very Self of theindividual. While caste and race remain different forms of socialoppression, viewing them as related is a creative political strategy.

At the World Conference on Racism at Geneva (the Durban ReviewConference, April 2009), the Government of India won a diplomaticvictory by ensuring that caste-based discrimination was not includedin the resolution.

The question of the efficacy or otherwise of taking issues to theUnited Nations (UN), and whether concrete gains can result from this,is not what interests me here. I am concerned with the politics ofgetting an issue recognised in a global context and the possibilitiesof translation from a local to a global context. What does suchrecognition achieve? In the case of caste, it does seem that thetranslation of caste-based discrimination into the language of racismmakes the issue visible and c­omprehensible to a worldwide audience.O­therwise, to a non-Indian public, caste remains a quaint, exoticpractice.

During a discussion in my class on this issue, a European studentVerena Milasta made an insightful remark. She said that given theprevalent western hegemony over cultural values, a thinking andconcerned left-liberal opinion in Europe, uncomfortable with thedemonising of non-western values, would hesitate to criticise caste,because it appears to be a unique institution specific to south Asiaand to India. Making the analogy with racism, she said, enables animmediate recognition of caste-based discrimination as oppressive.

Precisely this recognition is what the Indian government fears, ofcourse. Over the years, since dalit groups managed to put this issueon the agenda of anti-racism initiatives what are the arguments thathave been made by government representatives and academics to supportthe claim that caste cannot be equated with race? There are two mainarguments.

The Sociological Argument

Indrani Bagchi reported in the Times of I­ndia that, "Officials saidIndia was fighting the caste problem, particularly in the fightagainst poverty and inclusion. But this could not be equated withracism which has a physical component. By that token, every caste inIndia would be a different race" (Bagchi 2009). According tosociologist Dipankar Gupta, who testified before the UN Committee onthe Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD), there is nophenotypical resemblance between members of the same castes. (Aphenotype is "any observable characteristic or trait of an organism".)Moreover, descent and caste are not the same – descent meansgenealogical demonstrable characteristics. In the caste order, peoplecan be of multiple descents. In fact, in the caste system, marriage isonly permissible outside their lineage within their caste (UNCERDPress Release 2007). Goolam Vahanvati, Solicitor General of India,testified before the UNCERD that caste is an institution unique toIndia and therefore could not have been in the consideration of thosepreparing the documents preparatory to the Convention on theElimination of Race Discrimination.

The Constitutional Argument

This stresses that the Indian Constitu-tion prohibits suchdiscrimination, and t­herefore caste-based discrimination does notexist on a large scale in India, due largely to the government'saffirmative action policies.

All of those who make sociological a­rguments also make this claim. Inaddition, Dipankar Gupta is reported to have stated to the UNCERD that"any rich I­ndian could defy the tenets of caste hierarchy in India",which establishes the a­bsence of caste-based discrimination in India(quoted in Atrocity News 2007). This second point may be dismissedstraight away, for if accepted, then racism too does not existanywhere in the world – Obama is president of the US, no cons­titutionin the world today formally d­efends racism, and most governments havein place some sort of affirmative a­ction policy to deal with themarginal position of non-white citizens.

The first set of arguments, therefore, is what I will focus on here,turning to critical race theory to consider whether race indeedinvolves "a physical component", "genealogical demonstrablecharacteristics" or "phenotypical resemblances". The very idea that itdoes represents no simple biological fact, but constitutes part of aparticular intellectual formation that can be traced to the end of17th century E­urope. Robert Bernasconi points out that Europeans hadlong been aware of the multiplicity of different peoples, especiallysince by the end of the 15th century they had been exposed to travelreports w­ritten by missionaries, traders and explorers. However, inthe 16th and 17th centuries this awareness of diversity of peoples wasframed within theological concerns, and focused on the question ofbaptism. It was only at the end of the 17th century that Europeanscholars began to organise the mass of information available to them,and to start classifying different peoples into a manageable set ofgroupings. The first such effort is deemed to be that of FrancoisBernier, who acknowledged four or five different types (Europeans,Africans, Orientals, Laplanders and possibly another two types: nativeAmericans and Hottentots). His was not a rigorous classification,how­ever???(2001:12-13).

Thus, although there existed a huge slave trade that began in the 16thcentury, in which the Spanish and English exploited Jews, NativeAmericans and Africans, B­ernasconi tells us that this exploitationwas not sustained by a scientific concept of race. The introduction ofsuch a scientific argument in the 17th century helped legitimise thesepractices in a climate in which Europe itself was heading towardsideas of individual liberty and democracy. The author of thescientific concept of race is identified by Bernasconi as ImmanuelKant, an argument now widely acknowledged by historians of race,though philosophers have tended to ignore it (2001:15).

Kantian Anthropology

It took Nigerian philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze to draw attentionto Kant the anthropologist – Kant had developed courses inanthropology and geography and taught them regularly for 40 years.What were his sources of information on non-European peoples andcultures? Travel books, both serious and light, fiction and accountsof missionaries and explorers. Eze tells us that it is commonknowledge that one of the reasons Kant never left Konigsbergthroughout his professional life was because he wanted to stay in theseaport town to meet and gather information from seafarers. At onelevel then, as Eze says, Kant's "theory of race" as contained in hisanthropological and cultural-geographical writings can be seen asmerely a "provincialist's recycling of ethnic stereotypes andprejudices". However, Eze insists that this would be a superficialreading, for Kant's anthropology and geography offer "the strongest,if not the only, sufficiently articulated theoretical philosophicaljustification of the superior/inferior classification of 'races ofmen'…" (Eze 1997: 129).

Kant explained that by presenting the large number of apparentlydifferent types as races of the same genus, he was providing a"physical system for the understanding", in order not to beoverwhelmed by the data. He called the science dedicated to this task,"natural history" (cited in Bernasconi 2001: 22). Kant wanted to findthe natural causes for the deviations among human beings, and decidedthat skin colour should be the basis for distinguishing between races.While he conceded that such differences were also due to the effectsof sun and air, he argued that all human beings were equipped withnatural predispositions that were developed or held back depending onthe climate. Once these changes came about, they were irreversible.Race cannot be undone by further differences in climate. He alsoidentified the original genus as white (cited in Bernasconi 2001:23-24).

Thus, throughout the 18th century, scientists were obsessed with thequestion of why black peoples were black; the question of why whitepeople were white, of course did not arise, being the "stem genus", asidentified by Kant. All other colours were seen as merely degenerativedevelopments from the white original.

Bernasconi argues that what is significant is that Kant does not claimthat "race" occurs in nature, but rather, that the concept isnecessary from the viewpoint of natural history (2001:29).

This is why Cornel West argues that the very "initial structure ofmodern discourse in the west 'secretes' the idea of white supremacy":

my argument is that the authority of science, undergirded by a modernphilosophical discourse guided by Greek ocular metaphors and Cartesiannotions, promotes and encourages the activities of observing,comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics ofhuman bodies (2002: 91).

In other words, the discourse of race was based, not on some simplyascertainable physical, "phenotypical" characteristics, but on aconceptual map that ordered the vast diversity of peoples on thisplanet in particular way, mobilising the authority of modern science.The forms of rationality, aesthetic standards and notions of"­objectivity" that evolved, says West, could not accommodate thelegitimacy of the idea of black equality in beauty, c­ulture andintellectual capacity – indeed, even to think such an idea was to bedeemed "irrational, barbaric or mad" (2002: 91).

Thus, the development of the idea that humanity could be classified onthe basis of skin colour and other supposedly biologicalcharacteristics, was intertwined with the idea of white supremacy. Theinitial basis, says West, for the idea of white supremacy "is to befound in the classificatory categories and descriptive,representational, order-imposing aims of natural history" (99). Butthe second stage of the emergence of this idea came about with therise of sciences like phrenology (the discipline that claims humancharacter can be read through the shape of the human head) andphysiognomy, closely allied to a­nthropology. These new disciplinesopenly acknowledged "European" physical characteristics to besuperior, because they were closer to the Greek classical ideal, whichEuropean culture had by then e­stablished as the norm for beauty.

The idea of white supremacy "permeated the writings of the majorfigures of the Enlightenment", but what is significant, points outWest, is that they did not have to put forward their own arguments tojustify it – they all believed that the authority for these views camefrom science – from the domain of naturalists, anthropologists,physiognomists and phrenologists (105).

The Imprecision of Race

The deconstruction of the biological or natural basis of race hasproduced a vast body of scholarship around the construction ofwhiteness, too. David Roediger, writing about the United States, hasdrawn our attention to the "hopeless imprecision" of the term "white".The first Congress convened under the Constitution of 1790 requiredthat a person be white in order to become a naturalised citizen, as aresult of which the courts were left with "impossible problems ofinterpretation" that stretched well into the 20th century. As late as1907 the United States Attorney said: "There is considerableuncertainty as to just what nationalities come within the term whiteperson" (Roediger 2002:325)

Why could science not resolve this problem? Because ethnologicalwisdom constantly changed; because the term "caucasian", which hadcome to replace "white", included, according to ethnological experts,Syrians and Asian Indians, a view that clashed with the common senseview of government officials bent on excluding them as non-whites.Moreover, colour differences were so varied within "races" thatwhiteness could not be measured as simply the absence of pigmentation.Finally, a S­upreme Court judgment of 1923 set the test of whitenesssimply as being acceptableto "common understanding" – that is,white­­ness was pegged to socially set standards of whiteness(Roediger 2002: 326).

Many groups now commonly termed part of the white population werehistorically regarded as non-white or as of doubtful white heritage –Irish, Italian, Hungarian, and Jewish immigrants, for instance(Roediger 2002: 329). At times, a strong sense of ethnic identitycould cut against the development of a white identity. Thus, Poles inthe Chicago stockyards, when race riots broke out after the firstworld war, saw themselves as separate from both blacks and whites, andtherefore uninvolved (331).

In short, says Roediger, "the 'white ethnic' developed historicallyand he or she was certainly not white because of his or her ethnicity"(332).

Living in a Racialised Body

Does the argument that "race" is a sociological category,automatically dissolve race identity or reduce its oppressiveness? Ofcourse not. In his essay "The Fact of Blackness",1 Frantz Fanon writesabout the experience of living in a black body in a context of violentracism. The black man, he says, becomes inferior, an object, whenfixed by the white man's gaze. The elements of his self-consciousnesswere provided, not by his own understanding of his body but by thewhite man "who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes,stories…I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race,for my ancestors…I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics,and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectualdeficiencies, fetishism, racial defects…and above all else, above all:'sho good eatin'" (2003: 63).

That last joke, referring to all black people as cannibals, of course,followed us right into the 21st century, when the foreign minister ofPoland, Radek Sikorski, was quoted as saying: "Have you heard thatObama may have a Polish connection? His grandfather ate a Polishmissionary."2 (The heading of the story is misleading, as the rest ofthe story demonstrates. The government denied only that Sikorsky meantit as a joke himself – "He was only giving an example of theunpalatable and racist 'jokes' that surround President Elect Obama".)

Fanon cannot escape his blackness: "When people like me, they tell meit is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out thatit is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into theinfernal circle" (64).

But then, his blackness is turned into pride with his discovery of thepolitics and poetry of negritude: "from the opposite end of the whiteworld, a magical Negro culture was hailing me" (66). He discoversLeopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, discovers the rhythms of his race.The tom-toms become carriers of a "cosmic message" of community andsolidarity across the continents, that carries him on to the"shoulders of the world". He murmurs the thrilling words of Senghor:"Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black andshining" (67-69).

But even as he tried, says Fanon, at the level of ideas andintellectual activity, to reclaim his negritude, it was snatched awayfrom him. By whom? By no ordinary racist white man, but by Jean-PaulSartre, flaunting the banner of universal class identity:

...it is no coincidence", writes Sartre, "that the most ardent poetsof negritude are at the same time, militant Marxists. But that doesnot prevent the idea of race from mingling with that of class: thefirst is concrete and particular, the second, universal andabstract….the first is the result of a psychobiological syncretism andthe second is a methodical construction based on experience. In factnegritude is the minor term of a dialectical progression" (70-71).

When I read that page", Fanon tells us poignantly, "I felt I had beenrobbed of my last chance…While I was saying to him: 'My negritude isneither a tower nor a cathedral, it thrusts into the red flesh of thesun…' while I was shouting that, in the paroxysm of my being and myfury, he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minorterm…Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his bodyquite differently from the white man" (71-72).

Nevertheless, with all his strength, Fanon refuses to accept "thatamputation". He is black, he lives in a black body, and he willsimultaneously resist the meaning world gives to his blackness, andcelebrate the solidarities it brings him.

Caste, Race, Gender

The painful dilemma faced by Fanon is precisely the way in which theself comes to consciousness in other forms of embodied discrimination– caste and gender. When I say "embodied", I do not mean that the bodysimply exists in nature. The body in each of these instances isproduced through a network of cultural material practices. The bodythat is deemed to be inferior is caught up in the need to recogniseits difference from – and simultaneously claim similarity to – theoppressive identity that marks itself as Self, whether white,upper-caste or male.

In feminism, this has come to be embodied in the sameness-differencedilemma. Should we deny the difference (produced by our social andcultural locations) that marks us as women, thus accepting themasculine as the norm? Or should we assert the difference as valuable,as Carol Gilligan did in her work countering Alexander Kohlberg'sstudy that established that women are at a lower level of moraldevelopment than men. Rather than arguing that women too could reachthe highest levels of abstraction Kohlberg labelled as moraldevelopment, Gilligan suggested that women approach moral problemsdifferently because of their location in the sexual division oflabour, which makes them solely responsible for nurturing functions.As a result, they never evolve into the autonomous, disconnectedindividual that the masculine self does, and do not judge moralproblems in the abstract, and this is an aspect of "femininity" thatis precious.

Interestingly, later developments on Gilligan's work de-gendered thisargument, suggesting that men of subordinate communities too woulddisplay such characteristics, and that only the white adult male wouldever "reach" the stage Kohlberg designated as the highest in moraldevelopment.

The intertwining of such subaltern identities – race and gender, casteand gender – produce the greatest dilemmas for a radical politicalpractice. We need to avoid, of course, a merely additive approach, inwhich race or caste simply adds on to gender, making a woman bear a"double burden" (treble, if we add class).

The sameness/difference impasse and the dead-ends created by "identitypolitics" can be subverted by the recognition that there is always anoutside to every Self/Other discourse. The Self is never unified andhomogeneous, just as the Other is not. Rather, each identity canundercut the other – caste solidarity might produce a situation inwhich gender identity is irrelevant, or a feminist perspective mightin some particular situation result in solidarity with women ofanother caste than with men of the same caste. Particular kinds ofpolitical mobilisation succeed (or not) in producing particularidentities. Neither does a pre-formed subject called "women" exist forfeminist mobilisation, nor do pre-formed caste identities for castemobilisation. Identities form around particular kinds of politicalmobilisation, and are productively unstable. This instability isprecisely what makes possible alliances and solidarities.

In conclusion, the question: is "caste" to be collapsed with "race"?Of course not. The specificity of each must be retained, and onecannot be reduced to the other. Nevertheless, the translation of casteenabling it to be read against race in the global context is acreative political strategy.

Notes

1 This translation of the title of Chapter 5 of Black Skin, WhiteMasks has been criticised by David Macey for betraying the argumentFanon makes in it. Macey points out that Fanon's purpose in thischapter is to demonstrate that there is no "fact" of blackness (orwhiteness); that both are forms of lived experience. Macey suggeststhat "The lived experience of the Black man" would have capturedFanon's argument better (David Macey, "Fanon, Phenomenology, Race" inPeter Osborne and Stella Sandford (ed.), Philosophies of Race andEthnicity, Continuum London and New York, 2002).

Roediger, David (2002): "Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of'White Ethnics' in the United States" in Philomena Essed and DavidTheo Goldberg (ed.), Race Critical Theories (Oxford and Berlin:Blackwell Publishing).

This article is based on a lecture delivered in the Pandit HridaynathKunzru Memorial Lecture series of the School of International Studies,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (February 2010). An earlierversion was presented at the Department of Cultural Studies, Englishand Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (April 2009). The authorwould like to thank K Satyanarayana and Jayati Srivastava for theopportunity to benefit from discussions at both places.

Mumbai: A special court on Thursday convicted Anish Trivedi, a columnist under the Prevention of Atrocities Act for making casteist comments in a write-up published in a local tabloid.

Anish Trivedi had written on the bad state of affairs at government offices and attributed it to the reservation policy.

The special court today convicted Trivedi and sentenced him to six months' imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on him.

The case dates back to April 30, 2006, when Trivedi wrote an article titled 'Children of a lesser God', blaming caste-based reservations for bad governance.

A case was then registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act after some Dalit activists filed a complaint.

"The column was derogatory and directly attacked the Dalits. He not only tried connecting the inefficient government offices with caste reservations, but at several places he made distasteful comments, which were clearly casteist," said public prosecutor Shrikant Dukhande.

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The Planning Commission of India has set up a Task Force to Review the existing Guidelines on Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) and Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP) in 2010. The task force has submitted its report on 25th November 2010 and is due to be approved by the cabinet.

We observe that this report is total dilution of the original spirit of the policy.

The report has exempted 43 ministries from allocating funds under SCSP and TSP and another 10 ministries to allocate funds less than 15% and 9 ministries to allocate between 15-16% and only 6 ministries to allocate beyond 16.2%.

This recommendation not only reduces the availability of funds by 37% (approximately) but also limits the SCSP support to primary sectors and keeps no obligation to the ministries which are considered as the growth engines of the modern society.

Hence we request every educated Dalit to read this draconian report and act as you wish to get our rightful due share in the budget for the direct benefit of Dalits and Adivasis in the country.

In fact the present report has ignored the recommendations / suggestions given by eminent persons like Shri. P.S. Krishnan IAS (Rtd.) such as take out 16.2% and 8.2% for SCSP and TSP respectively before the plan budget is allocated to various ministries to overcome the divisibility and non-divisibility of funds.

This report instead of finding extra or more funds for the SCs and STs is recommending to subsidies flagship programs of the Govt. like MGNREGA, IAY etc with SCSP and TSP funds to the extent of the SC /ST beneficiaries in the programs..

To enable you to act we have given a gist of the recommendations from the report as well as the full text of the report download from the planning commission of India site. http://tinyurl.com/49rakjn

Warm Regards

Task Force to Review Guidelines on SCSP & TSP

Recommendations to Revise Guidelines for Implementation

By

Central Ministries/Departments, Government of India

Planning Commission

25th November, 2010

Terms of Reference

1.to re-examine and revise the extant Guidelines issued by the Planning Commission for implementation of SCSP and TSP;

to understand the operational difficulties in consultation with implementing Ministries and suggest remedial action so that SCSP and TSP can be implemented effectively

a) SC and ST concentration areas respectively, i.e. in the villages, blocks and districts having more than 40% SC/ST population respectively, and largely benefiting such villages, blocks and districts, and

b) in other areas, but which demonstrably benefits SCs/STs respectively

3.New/modified schemes which may be consideredfor being so taken up include:

1.A new scheme of giving assistance to States for purchasing private land for allotment to landless SCs.

2.Greater targeting of SCs under a) Vocational Training and Skill Development Scheme of the Ministry of Labor and Employment, b) Integrated Handloom Development Scheme of Ministry of Textiles,

3.Increase in the subsidy under SCA to SCSP Scheme of Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, and

4.Enhanced equity support to National Scheduled Castes Finance and Development Corporation (NSFDC),

4.Placing of Earmarked Funds for SCSP under the Separate Budget Head '789' and for TSP under '796'

MoU signed between the Planning Commission and the concerned Ministry/Department.

5.Strengthening of Administrative Arrangements for Planning and Implementation of SCSP/TSP

1.Nodal Units, to be headed by a Joint Secretary (Planning) or Economic Adviser should be set up in all Ministries/Departments, which have obligations to earmark under SCSP and TSP, with requisite full time supporting staff.

2.Ministries/Departments having obligation of earmarking more than 16.2% under SCSP and/or more than 8.2% under TSP may have a full time Joint Secretary level officer to head the SCSP/TSP Unit.

3.In the Planning Commission, the Social Justice Division may be headed by a Principal Adviser, with two Advisers to assist him – one each for SCSP and TSP.

4.The Central Tripartite Committee (CTC) must be fully activated, and it must regularly review implementation of SCSP/TSP, as also promptly resolve inter-ministerial issues, if any.

Instructions, based on this Task Force's recommendations outlined in para 5.1 to 5.7 above, to Central Ministries/Departments for preparing their Plan proposals under SCSP and TSP, accordingly.

2.Final plan outlays for 2011-12 to Central Ministries/Departments, it should separately convey the figure to be earmarked under SCSP/TSP (as is already being done for the NER).

3.To add requisite columns in the format for Statement of Budget Estimates (SBEs) to show scheme-wise outlays under SCSP/TSP, which must add up to the level communicated as per (ii) above.

7.Implementation of Non-lapsability feature

1.unutilized at the end of a financial year may be transferred, on the lines of the Non-lapsable Central Pool of Resources (NLCPR)

2.to two Pools to be named as "Non-lapsable Central Pool of SCSP Funds (NLCPSF)" and "Non-lapsable Central Pool of TSP Funds (NLCPTF)"

3.May be allocated to the Ministry of SJ&E and Ministry of Tribal Affairs respectively for implementing schemes for SCs and STs Development as well as for providing incentives to State Governments for effective implementation of SCSP and TSP, which may form a part of Central Assistance for State Plans.

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